Sugar

Modular web framework for Elixir

Goals

• Speed. Sugar shouldn’t be slow and neither should your project.
• Ease. Sugar should be simple because simple is easy to learn and use.
• Effective. Sugar should aid development. You have better things to which to devote your time.

Reason for Existence

Why build this when Dynamo, Weber, and Phoenix exist with growing communities? While these projects are great in their own right, Sugar aims to be another contender, sparking more development on all three projects (and/or others that may follow) and giving developers another option when deciding what framework fits their needs best. Sugar may even strive to shake things up just as ChicagoBoss has done.

Getting Started

# Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/sugar-framework/simple.git
cd simple

# Get project dependencies
mix deps.get

# Start the web server
mix server # or `iex -S mix server` if you want access to iex

Configurations

Sugar needs to be configured in your application’s config/config.exs in order to work. The following options are supported:

`config :sugar, router: MyWebsite.Router`

Tells Sugar which module to use as a router. This module should implement Sugar.Router, and should have at least one route defined. This is required.

`config :sugar, plug_adapter: Plug.Adapters.Cowboy`

Tells Sugar which web server to use to handle HTTP(S) requests. Cowboy is currently the only supported option, and Sugar will default to using Plug.Adapters.Cowboy if this is omitted.

`config :sugar, MyWebsite.Router, ...`

Tells Sugar how the specified router should be configured. The following options are supported:

• http: takes a key/value list with options to configure the specified :plug_adapter. Of particular usefulness:

  • ip: IP address the server should bind to. Should be a tuple in the format {x,y,z,w}. Defaults to accepting connections on any IP address.
  • port: port the server should listen on. Defaults to 4000.
  • acceptors: the number of acceptors for the listener. Defaults to 100.
  • max_connections: the maximum number of connections supported. Defaults to :infinity.
  • compress: whether or not the bodies of responses should be compressed. Defaults to false.

• https: takes a key/value list with the same options as http, or can be set to false if you don’t want to enable HTTPS. The following additional options(along with others from Erlang’s “ssl” module) are supported:

  • password: a plaintext, secret password for the private SSL key (if it’s password-protected)
  • keyfile: path to the PEM-format private key file to use
  • certfile: path to the PEM-format certificate to use
  • otp_app - If present, certfile and keyfile can be relative paths with respect to otp_app‘s priv directory.

Note: Create a self-signed certificate for easy HTTPS testing.

# Generate a keyfile
$ openssl genrsa -out key.pem 2048

# Create a CSR
$ openssl req -new -key key.pem -out request.pem

# Generate a certfile that expires in $NUM_DAYS
$ openssl x509 -req -days $NUM_DAYS -in request.pem -signkey key.pem -out cert.pem

Example

use Mix.exs

config :sugar, router: MyWebsite.Router

config :sugar, MyWebsite.Router,
  http: [
    port: 80
  ],
  https: [
    port: 443,
    password: "OMG_SUPER_SECRET",
    keyfile: "/path/to/key.pem",
    certfile: "/path/to/cert.pem"
  ]

Routers

Because Sugar builds upon Plug, it leverages Plug.Router to do the heavy lifting in routing your application, adding an alternate DSL.

Routes are defined with the form:

method route [guard], controller, action

method is get, post, put, patch, delete, or options, each responsible for a single HTTP method. method can also be any, which will match on all HTTP methods. controller is any valid Elixir module name, and action is any valid function defined in the controller module.

Example

defmodule Router do
  use Sugar.Router

  get "/", Hello, :index
  get "/pages/:id", Hello, :show
  post "/pages", Hello, :create
  put "/pages/:id" when id == 1, Hello, :show
end

Controllers

All controller actions should have an arrity of 2, with the first argument being a Plug.Conn representing the current connection and the second argument being a Keyword list of any parameters captured in the route path.

Sugar bundles these response helpers to assist in sending a response:

• render/2 - sends a normal response
• not_found/1 - sends a 404 (Not found) response

Example

defmodule Hello do
  use Sugar.Controller

  def index(conn, []) do
    render conn, "index.html.eex", []
  end

  def show(conn, args) do
    render conn, "show.html.eex", args
  end

  def create(conn, []) do
    render conn, "create.html.eex", []
  end
end

Todo Items

• basic authentication (?)
• Development error page

• Caching

  • Compiled HTML
  • Application Data

  • Adapters

    • ETS

Who's behind this?

Why, the contributors, of course! Would you consider being one? Please send a pull request :)

How to start contributing

The main product of this repository is the example terms in the file CONTRIBUTING.md. This project uses those guidelines as the basis for its own development process. Please refer to that file.

License

Sugar is released under the MIT License.

See LICENSE for details.